Granny Geek Explains Rich Pins

In case you missed the other posts in the Granny Geek series, I’ll give a brief recap. You can learn how Pinterest works and why you need good graphics. You’ll also learn where to put your copy on the graphics in your media library and why you need to tidy up your Pinterest boards. You won’t want to miss the post on pinning strategy and the purpose of community boards, or last week’s post on manual pinning. Today, we’ll talk about Pinterest’s rich pins.

I confess that a lot of times I jump into something feet first without really understanding it. My new Pinterest account for my blog proves my point. “You need a business account so you can have rich pins,” they said. And so, I started a new Pinterest account, made it a business account, and started the whole rich pins thing. Not knowing, of course, how this would benefit me or make my life better.

I’ll try to break it down for you. According to Pinterest, ‘Rich Pins have more information than regular Pins which encourages people to click through.’ Since I’ve decided to venture into the new frontier of Pinterest, I figured I might as well have Pins with more information. Of course, unless I remember to put the ‘more information’ in the alt tag line of the media file, having rich pins won’t help me a whole lot. Make sure you always put searchable keywords in your alt tag descriptions!

Pinterest makes you to apply for the Rich Pin feature (they don’t charge anything). Fortunately, it’s far easier than applying to college or grad school. First of all, know that I’ll explain how to do this for a self-hosted WordPress site, because I can only teach what I know. If you haven’t arrived at the point where you’ve moved to a self-hosted site, I encourage you to do so. You can sign up for my free course of getting started with a self-hosted WordPress site here.

Step One: Install Yoast SEO

You’ll need to install the free Yoast SEO plugin on your self-hosted WordPress site. If you already have it installed, good for you!

Once you’ve installed Yoast, you’ll need to activate it (click on the activate button and let Yoast lead you through the steps). Double-check to make sure that you have all of Yoast’s features activated before you start the Rich Pin application process.

You’ll also want to look at one of your already published blog posts to make sure you have metadata present. Just make sure you have categories, tags, and keywords for the post. This is as simple as adding a focus word for the blog post down in the Yoast panel at the bottom of a post. You should also open the media file for any photos you have on the post and make sure you have metadata for the post. Metadata includes things like keywords, categories, and tags. This is the information that Pinterest needs to know that you include in your posts so that they will approve you for Rich Pins.

Step Two: Applying for Rich Pins

Copy the link to the post that you have checked for metadata, and then click on over to Pinterest’s Rich Pin Validator page. Scroll down to the box that says “Enter a valid URL” and paste in the URL of your post that you copied in step one.

After your page is validated (you’ll see a preview of it), you’ll get a message letting you know whether or not Pinterest was able to validate your site. If it worked, you’ll see an “Apply Now” option. Click it.

A pop-up should appear with your website’s domain name and ‘HTML tags’ selected. Confirm that they have the right domain, and then click “Apply Now” again.

Pinterest cautions that you may have to wait awhile for your pins to become rich. I think it took about two days before I noticed a difference on my new pins, and several weeks before I noticed a difference on the pins from my older blog posts.

Why Do This?

After all that techno-junk, you’re probably wondering, “Why bother?” I don’t blame you. Trust me, having Rich Pins will help Pinterest categorize your pins (remember, it’s a search engine) and share them with the right people. Which will in turn lead to more people to find your great content!

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Anita Ojeda juggles writing with teaching high school English and history. When she's not lurking in odd places looking for rare birds, you can find her camping with her kids, adventuring with her husband or mountain biking with her students.

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